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Hi there, so for this video we're going to be doing something that's probably bordering a little bit on the crazy side, but it's taking what we've already covered to an extreme. So let's have a play shall we? So continuing with the theme of using Kurt Vices, Kurt do actually offer a system which is kind of like a hybrid between a tombstone and a set of standard fixed jaw vices. And it effectively gives you 8 clamping areas with 8 sliding jaws and 4 fixed jaws.

So we are going to import and rig one of these now. So I am going to go into the fixtures tab and click on advice and we are then going to go to the body section. and under our file we are going to grab the column and we are also going to grab the static numbered elements in this as well because these are our fixed jaws. So we can either do these all in one go or we can import them as extra nodes at a later stage.

but for the sake of keeping the element tree in our vice setup as simple as possible I'm going to do them all with the column as part of the initial body. Technically speaking these can be dismounted however so it is possible to set this up without these central static jaws. So if you are using one of these and you do want that particular flexibility then I would say import them as individual nodes and we are going to go through the process of how to do that in a second anyway because that is how we have to bring the mobile jaws in. So anyway we are going to click on add for now and that is our tower in place already which is a pretty big unit in this.

It's probably significantly too large for this machine. I will admit for the sake of this particular demonstration I did scale it down a little bit as well because I couldn't think of any machines big enough off the top of my head to accommodate it. Anyway as I say this is purely for demonstration purposes so it's not the end of the world. So the first thing that we are going to do is we are going to import our first jaw.

So let's have a look at this shall we. Let's just pan around a bit there. That is probably an easier view to work with. Now under jaw we are going to select the first jaw which is upper 1 and we are going to click on add.

And we are now going to add a new node and in this one we are going to add upper 2. Click on add and we are going to rinse and repeat until we have got all 4 sets of upper and all 4 sets of lower jaws in. Don't worry about the fact that they are coming up black right now we will go through how to fix that. So let's very quickly 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.

So that would be upper 3, add, upper 4, lower 1, lower 2, lower 3 and finally lower 4. So now that I have added all those I can close that window and hopefully we won't have to worry about it ever again. So how do we deal with these being basically dumb nodes that aren't able to do anything? Well fortunately that is quite simple.

So we have got a couple of ways of doing it. We can either double click on the node attribute here or we can click on properties, either way works. But before we do that I am going to define the parameters of the first moving jaw so we know exactly what it is we are going to be doing and we can repeat the content out for each of the follow up jaws. So if we click on properties now we have got a linear jaw, that's fine, we are going to call this upper 1 because we want to be able to keep track of what we are doing.

That's set to linear, that's fine. We need to set our max movement to 80mm and we need to set the direction to Z, specifically minus Z since it is moving down and then click on OK. Now you can see that that has now changed its name as well and we will just quickly test that the motion is what we are expecting. Oh dear, looks like we didn't save that value of 80.

So let's very quickly do that, type in 80 and press return which is vital after this and now we have got a much more sensible range of motion. So we are now going to do exactly the same for the rest of these. So we can double click to get into those which is just fine and you will notice this window that opens up is slightly different, that's because it is treating this as a fixed node. Now when I said earlier about being able to import these static jaws as separate nodes, this is what you would be bringing them in as.

So it means that you can dismount them if needs be and that's absolutely fine or we could import them as part of a single chunk as we did. So if we now change the node type from fixed to linear, we get all of the extra options that we need for the motion there. So we are going to set this to 80, return, direction, minus 1, return and OK. We didn't change the name so let's very quickly do that, put 2 and OK.

And now it's just a matter of basically repeating the same process which is a little tedious but such is the way of developing all this fancy kit, it's tedious once so it doesn't have to be tedious every time. So click on OK there and let's do the last of the upper nodes now. Linear, upper 4, 80 and minus 1. OK so those are our 4 upper jaws, all of which slide exactly how we want them to.

So now let's do our lower jaws. So if we set this as a linear, lower 1, 80 and we can leave that because it's going up instead of down and that's fine. So click on OK, do the same, lower 2, 80, OK. 3, OK and finally we can lower 4, set that range of motion and then press OK.

We've now just gone and defined probably what's going to be one of the more complicated fixturing arrangements you'll ever see in a milling machine used in one go unless you're dealing with multiple pallet systems. Eight independent vices arranged in a tombstone configuration on a 5-axis machine. Now I don't know about you but historically dealing with other CAM software that kind of a setup would have given me an absolute migraine whereas here we've just seen it done in a little over 8 minutes. Hopefully that's been helpful to you and I'll see you in the next video.

Take care.